Posts tagged with: national catholic reporter

Mark Scibilia-Carver, in a National Catholic Reporter “Viewpoint” piece, decries the nationwide call this coming weekend for Catholics to financially support the Archdiocese for the Military Services, which serves the entire U.S. military. That includes “more than 220 installations in 29 countries, patients in 153 V.A. Medical Centers, and federal employees serving outside the boundaries of the USA in 134 countries. Numerically, the AMS is responsible for more than 1.8 million men, women, and children.”

Why is Scibilia-Carver upset? He believes support of the Archdiocese for the Military Services is tantamount to evil and support of any war (and apparently the men and women who keep our country safe) is always unjust. (more…)

Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter also responded to the piece, with the comment, “Almost everything about this essay is obnoxious.”

But I think Winters really misses the central insight of Schall’s piece, which really is an Augustinian point:

A person who sorrows for someone who is miserable earns approval for the charity he shows, but if he is genuinely merciful he would far rather there were nothing to sorrow about. If such a thing as spiteful benevolence existed (which is impossible, of course, but supposing it did), a genuinely and sincerely merciful person would wish others to be miserable so that he could show them mercy!

Thus Augustine explores the implications of such “spiteful benevolence,” which I understand to be the basic point of Schall’s piece. Schall therefore wonders, “Do Christians love poverty as such, as a positive good? Do they want people to be poor so that they can be loveable?”

The spiritual danger of a love for others turning into a lust for dominating power is a real one, even if Winters doesn’t acknowledge it. What Augustine and Schall are really looking for is an attitude toward help that humanizes, one that doesn’t foster dependency in order to keep people in a state of misery, intentionally or not, directly or indirectly. This reality is the kind of loving help that the doctrine of subsidiarity is supposed to engender.

On Monday, January 28, the Rev. Robert Sirico participated in a debate, hosted by the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, on the role of government in helping the poor. Fr. Sirico debated Michael Sean Winters, a writer with the National Catholic Reporter, on the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The priest said during the debate that with the “overarching ethical orientation” a capitalist economy needs, it can provide for the needs of the poor. No solution, he said, will “get around the necessity of morally transforming society.”

He maintained that the free market is “morally neutral” and that the human actors in the market must bring good morals to it.

Winters argued that the free market system is not morally-neutral. Both men were dismissive of the theory of distributism, which upholds the right to private property but seeks to maximize the number of owners of that property.

While he believes distributism “is one of the legitimate approaches to an economy,” Fr. Sirico also thinks there are problems with it, calling it more of a “moral, aesthetic critique of forms of crass capitalism” than “an economic system.”

And Winters expressed having “a hard time seeing how we get from here, to any of the distributivist proposals I’m familiar with.”

The bishops’ point “that Catholics’ moral life cannot be separated entirely from their economic life has relevance for what we’re going through now,” said Kevin Schmiesing, research fellow for the Acton Institute, a proponent of free markets. “Unless you believe there is no moral component to this, that there’s no failure of responsibility, that there’s no greed at work, that those kinds of moral issues have no impact. … If you’re willing to concede that they do, then I think you can also concede that the bishops have a point.”